Successful construction of the ALPHA-g antimatter gravity detector:
In July 2018, the construction at TRIUMF of the time-projection chamber (TPC) for the new antimatter gravity experiment, ALPHA-g, was completed. The TPC detector has been shipped to CERN, where it is currently being tested. The detector is a key component for the ALPHA-g project, whose goal is to measure the gravitational property of antimatter by dropping antihydrogen atoms inside a detector. The TPC will measure the location of the antihydrogen annihilations, from which the effect of gravity will be inferred. According to the equivalence principle in Einstein’s theory of gravity, matter and antimatter should behave identically under the force of gravity. However, no one has ever seen how antimatter falls. The ALPHA-g experiment is set to be the first to do just that.